Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman pictures and hands-on

Walkman has landed on Android in the form of the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman. It’s an Android 2.3 device, compact, but not the sexiest phone that Sony Ericsson make, an accolade we give to the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S.

With a 3.2-inch screen, the Live with Walkman is towards the smaller end of Android handsets in terms of screen size and interestingly doesn’t carry the Xperia label. We asked a nearby Sony Ericsson agent why that was the case and he reported that would have simply been too much of a mouthful. Walkman trumps Xperia it seems.

But the Live with Walkman reflects much of the goodness we’ve seen on the Xperia devices recently, adopting the clustered corner-based controls to make things easier to manage on a smaller screen and giving quick access to your most important apps.

The hardware difference comes with that Walkman branding is a Walkman button, so you can fly into your music with a single press of the button on the top.

The Live with Walkman of course comes with all the benefits of Android and the run of updates that Sony Ericsson have been rolling out recently, so you’ll get 3D sweep panorama from the camera, for example.

From a design and build point of view, it reminds us of the Xperia X8, with the same style of volume buttons and camera button lodged on the right-hand side. The wrapping back plate also looks to be of the same style, so you can see the origins of the Live with Walkman in that mid-range handset from 2010.

As we said, it isn’t the skinniest phone around at 15mm and put next to something like the HTC Wildfire S it looks decidedly fat, but at the affordable end of the scale that's forgivable.

But it specs out rather well, offering a 1GHz processor, 5-megapixel camera, 720p video capture, along with all the normal connectivity.